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The Russian Ballet Before Dyagilev1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2017

Samuel H. Cross
Samuel H. Cross*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

The Origins of the Russian ballet reach back two hundred years to the reign of the Empress Anna Ivanovna, Peter the Great's niece (1730–1740). Anna was devoted to ostentatious amusements (balls, fireworks, tableaux), and in the summer of 1734 ordered the appointment of Jean-Baptiste Landé as dancing-master in the Military Academy which she had founded at St. Petersburg in 1731 to prepare sons of the nobility for positions in the army and the civil service. Beside teaching at the Academy, Landé also organized a private class which is the original ancestor of all further development of the ballet in Russia. Here he taught not only social dancing, but the principles of dramatic stage dancing, drawing his pupils both from the most gifted students in the Academy and from the children of wealthy urban families.

Type
Research Article
Information
Slavonic and East European Review American Series , Volume 3 , Issue 4 , December 1944 , pp. 19 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 1944

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Footnotes

1

This summary, based largely on M. Borisoglebski, Materialy po istoriirusskogo baleta, 2 vols., Leningrad, 1938–1939, was planned for a course on the history of the Russian theater, and is here reproduced in the interest of those not having the Russian materials at their disposal.

References

1 This summary, based largely on M. Borisoglebski, Materialy po istoriirusskogo baleta, 2 vols., Leningrad, 1938–1939, was planned for a course on the history of the Russian theater, and is here reproduced in the interest of those not having the Russian materials at their disposal.